France was the birthplace of reinforced concrete’s generalized application in construction. The basic elements of flat slab construction were developed by inventor François Hennebique at the end of the 19th century and then brought to market throughout Europe and North America. The material's flexibility made it conducive to casting on and then offsite framed by mass production ideas. France’s experimentation with prefab has a long and rich history; The years after the second world war were a particularly fertile time for industrialized concrete construction. Responding to housing shortages or massive rebuilds, standardization made it possible to develop large amounts of low-cost housing using factory cast pieces.
Raymond Camus’ panelized building became synonymous with prefabrication, housing millions of people within what became a connoted building type. The simplified version of wall and floor construction was deployed for dwellings all over western Europe inspiring similar strategies in Eastern Europe and eventually in North America. Many of the most famous heavy panel systems were developed for the French market and unfortunately some of their negative connotations still affect prefab's penetration in France. Visceral reactions to high levels of standardization with suspect construction and weatherproofing methods connoted prefabrication as a low-cost, low-quality, impersonal form of building inevitably leading to social problems.
The building process itself was not the problem. Isolationist planning strategies and urban renovation policies envisioned these buildings in bucolic landscapes with few local services creating dysfunctional communities that regrettably are associated with and symbolized by the building form. Recently, similar drivers that argued for industrialization in the mid twentieth century exacerbated by current labor shortages, the Covid 19 pandemic, process digitalization, stagnating productivity have inspired a renewed vision of industrialization notwithstanding low cultural adherence. BIM (building information modeling) is reforming the building planning and construction toward integrated processes bridging manufacturing with design and management. Within the spectrum of possibilities and tuned to ecological imperatives, contemporary industrialized large panel systems using timber (CLT, light wood framing, modular) are being promoted by the government as a carbon neutral building strategy to affordably supply various building types and improve construction’s efficiency.
From Raymond Camus to CLT - panelized construction systems
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